Neurologists receiving kickbacks from pharma companies for prescribing MS drugs. Shameful.
Yes another article from Nude Scientist pointing out problems with the medical industry. It’s incredible that any of us survive a single day on meds.
A really interesting article on the bias present in medical studies. And science generally. Helps to explain a lot about where we find ourselves with CCSVI.
Negative CCSVI results are hailed gleefully by neurologists as being proof that CCSVI is not causative of MS. But the same neurologists seem to think that MS is immunological, even though there is scant evidence of autoimmunity being causative of MS.
The problem for all the naysayers concerning CCSVI is that they aren’t presenting any kind of alternative theory. Neurologists don’t know what causes MS, and while the immune system is certainly involved - and is therefore the reason that immunosuppressants work, up to a point - the uncontroversial assumption that MS is an autoimmune disease does not withstand much scrutiny.
We’re spending a lot of time and money looking for a cure without first knowing the cause. This was not the approach taken with other immune diseases such as AIDS.
Here’s Joan Beal taking down the negative studies of MS at ECTRIMS. Note how the researchers are ignoring the theoretical framework behind CCSVI and are simply looking for blockages.
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=447033472210&id=110796282297&ref=mf
I started writing the Rubber Chicken Chronicles because of my frustration with a conversation about CCSVI that I had with my wife’s neurologist.
There are only about 350 neurologists in Australia and the ones we’ve met are all full-time scientists. As a (well-read, scientifically literate) lay person I had no hope trying to convince her that there was any evidence of the benefits of CCSVI treatment - even though I saw these benefits with my own eyes.
This is because, as a scientist, she had all her answers pre-canned. I believe in the scientific method, but I don’t practise it. So I got very frustrated that my own thoughts weren’t as organised as hers were, and that I wasn’t able to refute her in her own language. I felt that I needed to find a way to make my ideas and experiences more concrete - and therefore more defensible. And this is the fruit of that search.
The articles posted here represent, at the time of writing, my feelings about aspects of CCSVI which I haven’t seen written elsewhere. I have no reservation in saying that CCSVI is an effective treatment for some of the symptoms of MS - I’ve seen the treatment work on my wife, I held her hand as she went into surgery, and I saw the transformation of her personality over the following couple of days. The effect of treatment is real, or at least it was for us.
But there are some really big questions. Does CCSVI cause MS? Will fixing CCSVI stop the progression of disease? Will CCSVI treatment give MS patients a longer or better life? Will MS symptoms improve after CCSVI treatment?
I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I do have an opinion. The point is that nobody else knows, either. So when a neurologist tells me that the effect I saw in my wife after treatment - a pronounced, measurable and sustained improvement - could simply be the placebo effect, now I know why she said that, and why she was wrong. And why her opinion on this matter is no more informed than mine.
And that’s why I started this blog.
The treatment of CCSVI is something which neurologists have almost no specialised training for. They claim that they have substantial experience in the vasculature of the brain, but this is a half-truth. The whole truth is that almost nobody has studied the veins of the brain because all the attention has been focused on the arteries, which cause strokes. CCSVI was discovered precisely because there was so little research done on the veins draining the brain.
Read moreKatz barely ever gets the symptoms of a cold, so I guess this article means that she has a weak immune system. So this surely means that her immune system couldn’t be attacking her. Right?
I read only part of this and thought it’s very much how I feel about CCSVI at the moment. But I’m looking forward to reading the whole thing and commenting on it later.
Neurologists and other self-professed experts on MS want to think that our belief in CCSVI stems, essentially, from ignorance. They want to believe that we have blind faith in some new discovery that’s been promulgated by a small group of people who somehow have an interest in this theory - and that we need to be protected from being emotionally (and perhaps physically) harmed in the event that we’re mistaken.
Read more
So this is the world we live in. A world where it’s OK to feed babies who don’t need it genetically modified food, but we can’t provide adults with safe, tested treatment for a life threatening condition.
